Condensed thoughts 2016 through April 1, 2016

01 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by probaway in Condensed thoughts

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Condensed thoughts 2016

The Condensed thoughts of Probaway 2016

Condensed thoughts January 2016

01 January 2016 – Probaway Person of the Year Xi Jinping – Xi Jinping for taking China from a backward economy to the most powerful one on Earth.

02 January 2016 – How your appendix may be helping you live longer. – With appendicitis don’t take antibiotics or operate until you must.

03 January 2016 – You do have a choice – sometimes. – You do have free will, if and only if you have the time and opportunity to think.

04 January 2016 – Be it not do it. – Not ! – Meditation isn’t for sitting, it’s preparation for doing.

05 January 2016 – Why and how to approach a new situation with a smile. – Approach new and possibly dangerous situations with a smile, and you can generate your smile by first looking at people’s silly shoes.

06 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Growth only happens when you move on from your comfort zone.

07 January 2016 – The Better Angels of Our Nature – discussion – A new group of people is always a delight because they will inevitably bring ideas up in a new way.

08 January 2016 – How to make your skin more perfect. – Touch a bar of soap with your wet fingertip, touch the soapy tip to your blemishes, then rinse away the soap under a running tap, and then dry and massage the area.

09 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness – Happiness is in the present moment of progress toward a worthwhile goal.

10 January 2016 – How are we hurting ourselves with self-deception? – There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one’s conscience.

11 January 2016 – Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – 11 January 2016 – The best defense against diseases is by avoiding them as early as possible.

12 January 2016 – Once again we discuss happiness, but I have problems. – Give it your best, let it go, and intentionally walk away.

13 January 2016 – I want you to be happy – but at a higher level of consciousness – Happiness has higher levels that can be achieved.

14 January 2016 – Is happiness a behavior that can be learned? – A conscious pursuing of personal reality is the real path to happiness.

15 January 2016 – What things are stressing me this week? – Those were my stressors of the last two weeks; but I chose them, so they were pleasurable, not painful.

16 January 2016 – How to identify and avoid bad ideas. – Perhaps I’m being too harsh. — Avoid people who talk nonsense.

17 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Thoughts – Voluntarily change where you are placing your attention and you change your entire universe.

18 January 2016 – Steven Colbert has a cold. – Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully. As the title says, these posts have tried to help people live better lives.

19 January 2016 – Live long and prosper – upgrade – Live long and participate !!

20 January 2016 – New ideas are offensive !! – New ideas are dangerous and therefore offensive.

21 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Genius – When looking into the unknown it takes genius to know what is unusual and what is commonplace.

22 January 2016 – Mona Lisa has been restored for 3D – I have been working nearly nonstop since Christmas digitally restoring the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

23 January 2016 – I have done 3,000 posts at Probaway ! Whew !! Hm? !!! – Of course my daily question is what is important to blog about today?

24 January 2016 – How to expose better options to others? – You learn to expose yourself to better options by watching how others make choices.

25 January 2016 – A minor Mona Lisa setback – A good life isn’t found in lounging about with no problems and nothing to do, it’s finding important things that need doing, and doing them.

26 January 2016 – The Opening – To whom and to what is the Opening telling us to attend to?

27 January 2016 – My face is a jungle covered with bacteria. – Outside of our civil society we are living in a wild jungle and should behave in ways that fit our natural condition.

28 January 2016 – Irrational Man by Woody Allen – movie review – The Irrational Man shows yet another series of thoughts not to bother pursuing.

29 January 2016 – Some daylight in your eyes helps you focus better. – Go for a walk every day, smile at the sky and enjoy a friendly companion. Walking a mile to school or work would be perfect.

30 January 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fear – The best amount of fear is that which goads you to your best efforts.

31 January 2016 – The EarthArk is shockingly uninteresting. – A child born today may live to see the irretrievable end of nearly all life as we know it.

Condensed thoughts Probaway February 2016

01 February 2016 – What to do when you come to a fork in the road – Of course if we were not on a road, but on a trail, I would recommend the A trail, and avoid the B trail.

02 February 2016 – We are the chosen ones. We chose ourselves. – Pay attention to your local environment and participate.

03 February 2016 – Argus Dome deep-space refrigerator – Once in place the EarthArk temperatures can be maintained at —100° F. for thousands of years without any human maintenance.

04 February 2016 – How to think better. – Thinking better means to help our minds to help everyone participate more fully in our world, and to do that requires clean signals from our world.

05 February 2016 – Teach what you most need to learn to do and sell it. – Any brilliant person can succeed if they get started early in life.

06 February 2016 – World population passes 7.4 billion humans. – Life is wonderful now because the Earth is supporting 7.4 billion people.

07 February 2016 – Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – 07 February 2016 – We live in a dynamic and chaotic situation where every living thing is seeking food, and every other living thing is potentially a source of food, including YOU.

08 February 2016 – The 100 Greatest Atrocities of Human History – Modern humanity is doing just fine when compared to our past.

09 February 2016 – How to fix your distorted view of history. – Humans will eat voraciously, reproduce maximally and kill as needed, like every other predatory animal.

10 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Participate – Seeking to live long, and to participate with all that’s around you, is the route to a long and enjoyable life.

11 February 2016 – Black hole gravity waves detected near my old home. – I live a surprisingly tranquil life.

12 February 2016 – Wikipedia links to 100 Greatest Atrocities of History – This list adds up to 494.82 million homicides since 500 BCE.

13 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Evolution – Evolution isn’t a belief, it’s an observable fact.

14 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Love – Let my last breath be, “I love you!” and the last words I hear, too.

15 February 2016 – How people can move from maturity to sagehood – People grow in maturity when they are feeling expansive and take more responsibility for human welfare.

16 February 2016 – My Apatheism is pulling back the veil that obscures the obvious. – If I have anything that could be called a religion it is to pull back the veil so others can see what they previously did not see.

17 February 2016 – Learning to smell essential oils is difficult. – With huge industries based on smell and food odors, there must be some theoretical understanding of what is happening.

18 February 2016 – Mona Lisa comes to life in Bend, Oregon – Mona Lisa comes to life and will watch you move.

19 February 2016 – Mona Lisa and Charles Scamahorn in Bend, Oregon – That is why I spent so much time restoring the Mona Lisa. So you can see her magic too.

20 February 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Smile – Look at the sky and smile.

21 February 2016 – To grow you must be feeling emotionally positive. – Get yourself into a positive state of mind right before making decisions.

22 February 2016 – Do humans need a transcendent purpose for their lives? – If even Sartre can’t find a valid reason for his existence, what can the average man do?

23 February 2016 – The secret of Mona Lisa’s smile revealed. – Mona Lisa knows your secrets too!

24 February 2016 – Atrocities by Matthew White – book review – War is dangerous to your life and property, so choose leaders who will keep you out of war.

25 February 2016 – What is your ultimate value? – A personal ultimate value must be practiced and promoted to be valuable.

26 February 2016 – Mona Lisa in 3D big enough to see clearly. – When you cross your eyes it is possible to see her in three dimensions.

27 February 2016 – I try to stay healthy, but today I have a cold. – I’ve taken two baths today, and always feel better afterward, so I’m going in now.

28 February 2016 – “Bat shit crazy!” – If bat intestinal biota is as powerful as similar human biota, it may open a totally new field of medical practice.

29 February 2016 – EarthArk day went by without a hitch. – Rich people living in paradise refuse to take care of ugly things.

Condensed thoughts Probaway March 2016

01 March 2016 – My life with shamans. – Each shaman can be more productive if their stories are based on personal experience and analysis and conclusions.

02 March 2016 – People are incapable of thinking beyond their maturity level. – At the beginning of a conversation discover the interests of a person, and speak exclusively to those.

03 March 2016 – What is the good life? – The good life is right here when looked at that way, so why go wandering all over the world, like some of my friends do?

04 March 2016 – Why can’t people think for themselves? – I don’t claim to be any better at this than anyone else, and it is just a question of whom you choose to put your attention upon.

05 March 2016 – Hey kids! What are you going to do when the mountains run dry? – With accurate information there can be foresight and better actions.

06 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fate – Our greatest personal freedom is choosing how we respond to events.

07 March 2016 – Philosophers Squared – Karl Jaspers – Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself.

08 March 2016 – Gracious receiving of a gift is the greatest gift of all. – Instantly returning something of value makes the original gift not a gift given in love, but more of an economic transaction, and that is not what is intended by the gift.

09 March 2016 – An easy experiment to improve your skin. – A healthy skin microbiome is a good defense against skin problems.

10 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Fear – Fear is a good thing when it prevents us from doing stupid things.

11 March 2016 – People need hopes based on achievable realities. – When you graduate from high school, if you can’t go to a top university become a small home owner.

12 March 2016 – Humans versus the future Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Humans being integrated into AI is a process of us living forever.

13 March 2016 – A cry of existential desperation? – Sometimes I trust other people’s opinions more than my own.

14 March 2016 – Emptiness is an empty goal. – Life expands in meaning as one progresses in their sustainable maturity.

15 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Anxiety – Anxiety confuses the mind and replaces meaningful action with dithering.

16 March 2016 – The Hidden Half of Nature by Montgomery and Bikle – review – The Hidden Half of Nature is an easy read backed up with twenty pages of fine-print scientific documentation.

17 March 2016 – Now is the time to seed the Universe. – The goal of sentient human beings is to help the Universe evolve into the fully conscious super-being that it is capable of becoming.

18 March 2016 – Avoid unnecessary risks. – If you think you are about to do something stupid, you certainly are, so don’t.

19 March 2016 – How to do quick personal introductions in a group. – A quick way to remember a person’s name is by linking it with an interest.

20 March 016 – Help in finding meaning for other people’s lives. – How do you create personal meaning in a Universe made of simple fundamental forces that have no inherent meaning?

21 March 2016 – A different Golden Rule for different levels of maturity. – The moral quality of humanity is still improving and humans are becoming more humane.

22 March 2016 – The world is surprisingly low on public homicide. – Isn’t it obvious that the world is improved by helping others improve their lives and not terrorizing them?

23 March 2016 – How can you choose the proper life path? – Always do the right thing at the right time, and avoid doing the wrong thing all the time.

24 March 2016 – How to pop the media bubble ! ? – Media must be made to pay in dollars for the harm they create with their stories.

25 March 2016 – The Tao Teh Ching – #22 – Revealed by Lao Tzu – Rendered by Charles Scamahorn – “The imperfect beckons perfecting.” It is through restoring that wholeness is achieved.

26 March 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Selfishness – It is impossible for a selfish person to be happy, because they always want more of what they don’t have, and they don’t have contentment with what they do have.

27 March 2016 – See risk before it becomes risky. – If you think someone is about to do something stupid, quietly move to where you can’t become involved.

28 March 2016 – And, still there is the wonder. – Try these words in a cartoon balloon of the president’s pointed finger about to be pressed down onto a big red button, “You’re fired!”

29 March 2016 – Paths through Maturity from Infant to Ourora – To maximize happiness behave at your highest maturity level.

30 March 2016 – DO NOT ENTER – “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
In the end as at the beginning it is better to heed the words – “DO NOT ENTER.“

31 March 2016 – Mona Lisa gets even weirder. – You can generate the Mona Lisa optical illusion in living people.

Condensed thoughts Probaway April 2016

01 April 2016 – The world runs on promises. – The middle way is freedom from too little money or too much money.

02 April 2016 – Moving our sentient life into the Universe. – It is possible for us to boldly go where no man has gone before, with the help of our intelligent machines.

03 April 2016 – Living well depends on how you reassemble your habits. – We are masters of our fate only when we consciously control our perceptions and our body’s expressions.

04 April 2016 – How to mature from Infantile to Sage and beyond. – People can grow when they are feeling good, and wither when they feel bad.

05 April 2016 – My life as a work of art – Perhaps every person’s own inner artwork is seen by others as bizarre and insane if the individual is foolish enough to expose themselves and IT.

06 April 2016 – Moving our sentient life into the Universe. #2 – https://probaway.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/moving-our-sentient-life-into-the-universe-2/

07 April 2016 – How do you know that? ??? – Science is based on testable ideas that are tested and challenged.

08 April 2016 – It’s easy to be loving when you feel good. – It’s easy to be loving when you feel good.

09 April 2016 – Look for universal problems. – To find universal problems we must: Look for universal problems!

10 April 2016 – Look at the surface and then beyond it. – If you are going to understand why things behave the way they do, you must ask the right questions.

11 April 2016 – Maturing our behavior from Infant thru Sage +. – The steps through these stages of maturity are where you place your attention when you are ready.

12 April 2016 – Today I heard a strange clapping sound. – The second clap was for my reciting my sonnet, The Goal of Marriage.

13 April 2016 – Experimenting with voice to Google docs transferred to WordPress – The same form of chaos soon becomes boring to a mind seeking novelty.

14 April 2016 – How pessimism and optimism affect human maturation – Intentionally get into an optimistic attitude when you approach a new situation.

15 April 2016 – A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Pessimism – The pessimist looks at problems and grumbles; the optimist looks at them and works on a solution.

16 April 2016 – A meditation for maturity – Practicing all of the levels of human maturity shows one a way to go to a better place than where they presently are living.

17 April 2016 – J. Robert Oppenheimer and Vincent Van Gogh – A strange overlap between Vincent Van Gogh, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Charles Scamahorn.

18 April 2016 – Positing universal solutions for all humans isn’t difficult. – Treat others not as you would like them to treat you, but as they should treat you.

19 April 2016 – Some of my favorite Probaway posts. – What I am doing now always seems important; it’s always like that.

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xxx

How to do quick personal introductions in a group.

19 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by probaway in policy, psychology

≈ 2 Comments

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Group introductions, Remembering people's names

I have been attending small group meetings almost every day this last year, and most of these groups are growing in membership. Because there are usually some new people we often have a quick round robin introduction, so everyone has a chance to be exposed to everyone else’s name. When there are twenty-five people those introductions can take too long. This is a serious problem if people begin expatiating on their self-proclaimed wonderful histories. Everyone has a story to tell, and usually they are interesting, but people don’t come to the meetings to hear about someone’s life, but to talk about the announced subject.

So, there is a conflict of priorities, and this last meeting I suggested that each person say their name and a single word that described their most salient quality. That worked out well as “most” people played the game and encapsulated their entire present existence into a single word. When it came back to me I said: Charles – anxiety. That immediately lead to one of my friends saying, “You handle it really well!” I did restrain myself by not commenting on that comment, even though I could probably go on for hours with illustrations and stories. Probably everyone else could too, but fortunately we moved on to our scheduled discussion.

So my thoughts here are about what might be appropriate single word questions that people would be comfortable with as a one-word personal description of themselves. Okay, hyphenated words are allowed. Here are some examples with my responses:

What was your previous residence? Charles – Berkeley-California
What is your favorite hobby? Charles – Blogging
What is your favorite local restaurant? Charles – Spork
What was your favorite subject in school? Charles – Science
Who is your favorite philosopher? Charles – Me
Who is the most famous person you have spoken with? Charles – Oppenheimer
What was your best job for your abilities? Charles – Air-Force-Pilot
What is your favorite exercise? Charles – Walking
Who is your favorite author? Charles – Conan-Doyle
What’s your favorite food? Charles – My-ice-creams
What’s your favorite beverage? Charles – Green-tea
What is something you wish you knew more about? – Charles – Saving-humanity
Where would you like to vacation? Charles – New-York
What is your favorite TV show? Charles – Steven-Colbert
What historical place would you most like to visit? Charles – Classic-Athens

These are intended to be nonthreatening questions that are just a bit thoughtful, and do illustrate a person’s basic interests.

A quick way to remember a person’s name is by linking it with an interest.

Black hole gravity waves detected near my old home.

11 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by probaway in diary

≈ 4 Comments

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Strange events in my life

I graduated from Columbia High School in Richland, Washington, in June of 1953. At that time housing was very scarce, because of the thousands of workers employed at Hanford Atomic Energy facility, and my family was living in a trailer home at lat/lon 46.3507, -119.2762. It was directly across an open field from the Hanford facility where the government was creating plutonium for atomic bombs.

I lived across the street from Hanford in the lot beside the STOP sign.

We had just moved there from Moses Lake, where I had attended high school part of the previous year. The strange coincidences of these two events is that I was in Moses Lake when the very first B-52 bomber flew in from Seattle, where it was made, to the local airport for testing and further work. These bombers are still in use as delivery systems for the bombs built at Hanford. Only six years later I myself was an Air Force pilot, about to be given responsibility for these same bombs. I never planned any of those three strange and independent events; they just came along. And to add bizarreness to these events, I met Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband authorized the Atomic Bomb project, and also I spent a half hour talking to J. Robert Oppenheimer at his home in Princeton. He was the administrator of the whole thing, the Manhattan Project. Why me? I could list several more of these strange coincidences with the bomb, but it gets too weird.

Just reported today was the discovery of one of the most powerful events ever to happen in the Universe. What was observed was a gravity wave from the collision of two black holes, over a billion years ago. That wave was discovered at the LIGO facility over at Hanford. The facility is angled to the left of the above picture, nine miles across an empty field, at lat/lon 46.4551, -119.4076. The LIGO was recently upgraded, and will soon have an additional upgrade, so they will probably be reporting more of these events. It appears to have been the swirling collision of two black holes, each of which was about thirty times more massive than our Sun. In less than a second it yielded energy equal to three solar masses. That’s a big event, but it was very far away in space and time.

I live a surprisingly tranquil life.

The EarthArk Project is still the right way to save species

09 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by probaway in EarthArk

≈ 14 Comments

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BBC sixth extinction, BBC-freeze plant DNA, EarthArk, Lifehaven, List of EarthArk posts

There is an article in the BBC news yesterday, Scientists rush to freeze plant DNA before ‘sixth extinction’, that rekindled my thoughts on my many posts on the EarthArk. It seems, according to this article, there is a massive rush to save all the species of the world. That assertion strikes me as strange because I have received almost zero interest in The EarthArk Project. At present it is difficult to find it, even with a delimited Google search, even though there is an abundance of other inane stuff that percolates to the first page.

Some quotes from the article: “The project is part of the Global Genome Initiative, which aims to gather and preserve the DNA of all life on Earth in cryo-storage facilities.” Many are “already growing in botanic gardens. Most can be found within a five-mile (8-km) radius of Washington, DC.” “A growing international network of cryo-storage facilities is taking part in the Global Genome Initiative. There are 25 so far on every continent except Antarctica.”

It is wonderful that the Global Genome Initiative is being developed; however, the statement that there are 25 of these genetic banks apparently spread across 25 locations everywhere except Antarctica is strange to me. Antarctica is the exact place where they should be putting the major effort, because some places in Antarctica are cold enough for permanent storage for thousands of years without any human supervision. The cryogenic containers in the existing Global Genome Initiative must be maintained constantly by human intervention, and if the containers ever come to room temperature for very long all their work is lost forever. If the grid power is lost, the containers must be chilled with alternate power like gas-powered generators, but if the fuel runs out the whole system fails.

A simple shipping container set into the Argus dome in Antarctica at 13,000 feet altitude, which is even higher than the South Pole, would never come above -40°C, and at that temperature there is no biological activity. If DNA can be recovered from 30,000-year-old Neanderthals found in temperate regions of Europe, certainly DNA would survive in much better condition and for a much longer time on the Argus dome.

In the BBC article it was mentioned that a high percentage of the world’s species live within a five-mile radius of Washington, DC, in botanical gardens. That isn’t comforting. See The Doomsday Clock chart created by the Atomic Scientists themselves. When we are discussing subjects like surviving the 6th extinction the ugly existential problems must be addressed, and a five-mile radius of the Capitol is within the fireball radius of a larger H-bomb. In the long run, that is millions of years, we must consider that location as too high a risk for a DNA storage bank. As I write this there may be hundreds of these weapons aimed at that exact spot. The genetic storage bank at Svalbard is equally useless in the long run, because of obvious warm weather, and being a bomb target. I am unfamiliar with the other 23 they are referring to, but one would hope some of them would survive a year without dedicated human help. The EarthArk would survive easily, forever, and it should be built immediately.

List of EarthArk posts from the most recent to oldest

(This page – Index of The EarthArk category’s posts)
Potential enemies of the EarthArk project
How to save the frogs of the world
Vint Cerf discusses 1000 year storage of digital information
What is worth saving? DNA, Life, Humanity, Civilization, anything?
The EarthArk Project made even easier.
The World Sustainability Date
Our Final Hour by Martin Rees – book review
The Fate Of The Species by Fred Guterl – book review
The Watchman’s Rattle by Rebecca D. Costa – 2nd review
How our finest humans are leading us to disaster
Edward Teller – patriot !?
February 29th is Leapday and Earth Ark Day
Ignite Bend 8 was inspirational.
Why Svalbard, seed bank is in the wrong place.
February 29th is The Earth Ark Day
I’ve been rejected by the Ignite Bend committee.
How do we get a person to be interested in the distant future?
Individual human rights balanced with humanity’s rights.
Our food comes from cheap energy.
Population and resource consumption explosions explained.
Demonstrate your thankfulness on Thanksgiving Day.
7 Billion people versus food which needs land, water and energy
Copper is becoming scarcer but is essential to modern civilization.
Creating The EarthArk is the most moral thing humanity can do.
Saving endangered species is overly optimistic
Ice flow in Antarctica and The EarthArk Project
Archive books, seeds, animals and people.
Some certain things about The EarthArk Project
People only pay for things they know they want.
Christchurch is humanity’s center for survival.
The Earth Ark Project – Index page is listed by date posted
Striving toward a new meaning for human existence.
The Nuclear Tipping Point by US Secretary of Defense.
It is a sad day for me.
70% of known plant species are at risk of extinction.
A moving adventure begins with a new house
How to we find a comfortable home for old age?
Worse than War by Daniel Goldhagen – book review
Top 3 events for humanity! – Ever.
What if we had a population explosion in reverse?
Mountain top adventures in Antarctica
Your personal EarthArk in a free water bottle.
What would I like to have accomplished in 10 years
Global Catastrophes aren’t all that bad. – NOT ! ! !
A new myth for the 10,000 year Ecstasy
The EarthArk seeds need a big airplane for transport.
What will control the world for 10,000 years?
2012 – The movie – A caustic review.
A quick recovery plan from a Doomsday disaster
Preparations for a basic EarthArk
Homeplanet Security – Update of major risks.
Toba or not Toba that was a question of human survival.
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #4
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #3
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #2
The EarthArk Project vaccine bank.
Where the people aren’t on planet Earth?
How you can solve The Doomsday Equation
The Age of Stupid – movie review and meeting.
Who wants to die on Doomsday day? Not I!
Eliminating poverty from the Earth
My previous blogs might have been too negative to be read.
New Year’s Resolutions must be meaningful.
Probaway Person of the year Nadya Suleman (Octomom)
The evolution of my thoughts is getting weirder.
How to make big stone domes cheaply.
Living antifreeze compounds may save species.
Who will be the most hated person in history?
Give people of the future what they need to survive.
Now is the best of times but it’s also the worst of times!
Megaprojects for the real future.
Saving the animal world with cryonics.
Restoring animal life to a ravaged Earth.
Richard Jefferies – The Story of My Heart – review
What are the tipping points for the world?
The laws of world society in 5000 years
Soon Doomsday will end and the New Adventure will begin.
WMDs – The Current progress defending against terrorism
Human life on Earth in the year 7,000 CE.
PM Gordon Brown too little too late for Paradise.
Lederman, Alvarez and the “Crater of Doom”
Now we can’t avoid destroying the Earth.
It’s coming! The flood that is and we need the EarthArk.
Fallen Leaf Lake, CA. The good life.
What is the ideal human population for maximizing happiness?
The near future must include an EarthArk.
And that’s the way it is—and I still love it.
Cold, Dark and Empty
The coming human population crash is an unpopular topic.
Population pendulum will soon swing to well below a billion people
Ancient Homer lends hope to our despair.
With great power comes great responsibility—and YOU have the power to save the world.
The EarthArk Project Goals
What books should be discarded?
Doomsday and Virtual Weapons States
Oil consumption collides with disaster
Field guide to the Apocalypse in review
Famine is now here and coupled with A-bombs and ICBMs.
Darwin Awards are coming humanity’s way.
How to get to an Earthark container in Central Antarctica
Potential Earthark sites in central Antarctica
Antarctica mountains considered for Eartharks
Antarctica’s Gamburtsev mountains and the Earthark.
Earthark Project – Sample Index Page
Where are the coldest places in Antarctica?
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Revivification Of Mother Earth
Earthark, Lifehaven and Recuperate The Earth
The term EarthArk sent to California
Happy New Year from Dr. Doomsday
EarthArk supporter certificates and buttons
Doomsday, Armageddon, Apocalypse and Revelation
The probable future of humanity
EarthArk logo
Caffe Mediterraneum is the first EarthArk drop site.
The first EarthArk is being prepared for Antarctica.

There is also many posts on The Life Haven Project, aimed more at saving animal families than plant DNA.

Thanks to Duncan for alerting me to the BBC article.

Index of EarthArk category’s posts

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by probaway in EarthArk

≈ 6 Comments

List of EarthArk posts from the most recent to oldest

(This page – Index of The EarthArk category’s posts)
How to save the frogs of the world
Vint Cerf discusses 1000 year storage of digital information
What is worth saving? DNA, Life, Humanity, Civilization, anything?
The EarthArk Project made even easier.
The World Sustainability Date
Our Final Hour by Martin Rees – book review
The Fate Of The Species by Fred Guterl – book review
The Watchman’s Rattle by Rebecca D. Costa – 2nd review
How our finest humans are leading us to disaster
Edward Teller – patriot !?
February 29th is Leapday and Earth Ark Day
Ignite Bend 8 was inspirational.
Why Svalbard, seed bank is in the wrong place.
February 29th is The Earth Ark Day
I’ve been rejected by the Ignite Bend committee.
How do we get a person to be interested in the distant future?
Individual human rights balanced with humanity’s rights.
Our food comes from cheap energy.
Population and resource consumption explosions explained.
Demonstrate your thankfulness on Thanksgiving Day.
7 Billion people versus food which needs land, water and energy
Copper is becoming scarcer but is essential to modern civilization.
Creating The EarthArk is the most moral thing humanity can do.
Saving endangered species is overly optimistic
Ice flow in Antarctica and The EarthArk Project
Archive books, seeds, animals and people.
Some certain things about The EarthArk Project
People only pay for things they know they want.
Christchurch is humanity’s center for survival.
The Earth Ark Project – Index page is listed by date posted
Striving toward a new meaning for human existence.
The Nuclear Tipping Point by US Secretary of Defense.
It is a sad day for me.
70% of known plant species are at risk of extinction.
A moving adventure begins with a new house
How to we find a comfortable home for old age?
Worse than War by Daniel Goldhagen – book review
Top 3 events for humanity! – Ever.
What if we had a population explosion in reverse?
Mountain top adventures in Antarctica
Your personal EarthArk in a free water bottle.
What would I like to have accomplished in 10 years
Global Catastrophes aren’t all that bad. – NOT ! ! !
A new myth for the 10,000 year Ecstasy
The EarthArk seeds need a big airplane for transport.
What will control the world for 10,000 years?
2012 – The movie – A caustic review.
A quick recovery plan from a Doomsday disaster
Preparations for a basic EarthArk
Homeplanet Security – Update of major risks.
Toba or not Toba that was a question of human survival.
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #4
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #3
Global Catastrophic Risks by Bostrom & Cirkovic – review #2
The EarthArk Project vaccine bank.
Where the people aren’t on planet Earth?
How you can solve The Doomsday Equation
The Age of Stupid – movie review and meeting.
Who wants to die on Doomsday day? Not I!
Eliminating poverty from the Earth
My previous blogs might have been too negative to be read.
New Year’s Resolutions must be meaningful.
Probaway Person of the year Nadya Suleman (Octomom)
The evolution of my thoughts is getting weirder.
How to make big stone domes cheaply.
Living antifreeze compounds may save species.
Who will be the most hated person in history?
Give people of the future what they need to survive.
Now is the best of times but it’s also the worst of times!
Megaprojects for the real future.
Saving the animal world with cryonics.
Restoring animal life to a ravaged Earth.
Richard Jefferies – The Story of My Heart – review
What are the tipping points for the world?
The laws of world society in 5000 years
Soon Doomsday will end and the New Adventure will begin.
WMDs – The Current progress defending against terrorism
Human life on Earth in the year 7,000 CE.
PM Gordon Brown too little too late for Paradise.
Lederman, Alvarez and the “Crater of Doom”
Now we can’t avoid destroying the Earth.
It’s coming! The flood that is and we need the EarthArk.
Fallen Leaf Lake, CA. The good life.
What is the ideal human population for maximizing happiness?
The near future must include an EarthArk.
And that’s the way it is—and I still love it.
Cold, Dark and Empty
The coming human population crash is an unpopular topic.
Population pendulum will soon swing to well below a billion people
Ancient Homer lends hope to our despair.
With great power comes great responsibility—and YOU have the power to save the world.
The EarthArk Project Goals
What books should be discarded?
Doomsday and Virtual Weapons States
Oil consumption collides with disaster
Field guide to the Apocalypse in review
Famine is now here and coupled with A-bombs and ICBMs.
Darwin Awards are coming humanity’s way.
How to get to an Earthark container in Central Antarctica
Potential Earthark sites in central Antarctica
Antarctica mountains considered for Eartharks
Antarctica’s Gamburtsev mountains and the Earthark.
Earthark Project – Sample Index Page
Where are the coldest places in Antarctica?
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Revivification Of Mother Earth
Earthark, Lifehaven and Recuperate The Earth
The term EarthArk sent to California
Happy New Year from Dr. Doomsday
EarthArk supporter certificates and buttons
Doomsday, Armageddon, Apocalypse and Revelation
The probable future of humanity
EarthArk logo
Caffe Mediterraneum is the first EarthArk drop site.
The first EarthArk is being prepared for Antarctica.

115 items

The very 1st B-52 bomber flight lands at Moses Lake

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by probaway in B-47

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

B-47, B-52, H-Bombs, Moses Lake, My strange life experiences, Oppenheimer, Richland Bombers

April 15, 1952, a B-52 prototype flew from Boeing Field in Seattle to Moses Lake, Washington. Now it’s sixty years later and those B-52 intercontinental bombers are still being used by the US military. It is hard to imagine how many hours the fleet of B-52s has logged in those sixty years, but what is so very strange to me is that I was there when that first plane landed. I was a junior in high school that spring at Moses Lake, the B-52s’ first base.

A year later I graduated from Richland high school, fifty miles south, as a Columbia Bomber, where the plutonium for A-bombs to be used by those B-52s was being made. Just a few years later I was in J. Robert Oppenheimer‘s home, in Princeton, New Jersey, asking him to give an antiwar talk to the Unitarian church in Pullman, Washington. Only two years later, as a B-47 pilot, I was sitting on a multi-megaton bomb thinking this was the last place in the Universe I wanted to be. There were other strange occurrences in my life journey, but this first flight of the B-52 truly came out of the blue in yesterdays news.

I have been plagued by super-weapons all my life, and I believe it’s only through surprising statistically unusual good luck they have never been used. Most people rarely think about those ultimately destructive weapons, but I do every day. These weapons are much worse than the WMDs the media worries our public about. Adding nine or ten zeros for the power of individual weapons, plus another four zeros for the number of weapons available, doesn’t enter the yelling-head pundits’ brains as significant. The difference between the Boston Bombers’ pressure-cooker bomb that created so much silly fury and what’s currently available flies right past them.

I have wasted my life trying to understand the human situation well enough to make a path to human survival even if those thirty thousand A-bombs are used. In one way and another that has been the guiding principle and continuing motivation for this Probaway blog. How can we have a human population ten thousand years in the future equaling that of ten thousand years ago? Hoping that those weapons wouldn’t be used in that expanse of time seems an impossible hallucination.

CENTURY by Bruce Bernard – book review

14 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by probaway in photography

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

How humanity survives., Photographs of real life, The 20th century

Century by Bruce Bernard may well be the saddest book you will ever read. It is a history of our 20th century done in photographs, brief commentaries and quotations. It is sad because it shows how seemingly positive well-intentioned people committed the most horrendous atrocities imaginable. It is a graphic description of the periphery of humanity’s need to express their sovereignty and their heart-felt desires for personal survival.

There are 1,072 photos in CENTURY and every one of them is soul-rending, if you pause to project your self into the moment portrayed and its consequences. Photos of dead and dying people are easy to be horrified with, and there are plenty of those; but what is even more disturbing, when you pause and ponder, are the images of the joyous politicians and their crowds of supporters. Those are the beautiful moments, in those social groups and those individuals’ lives, that set up the communal contagion of righteousness for the mass murders that follow. When people are in a group that believes they are absolutely right in their beliefs they become capable of unlimited evil. I have posted that idea before because I have observed the finest people I have known preparing for the worst that reality has to bring upon their fellow human beings.

As a consequence of humans’ super success for using the potentials that the Universe has provided us, our population has grown to the point that we will strip the Earth bare of what sustains us within the lifetimes of children now living. But before that consumption is total there will be shortfalls of the essentials of life, such as water and soil, that will trigger widespread famines and thus wars. Sadly the weapons we have possessed for half a century, when used, are sufficient to destroy civilization a hundred times over.

If this book CENTURY is redone for the year 2100 a sovereign global law will be in force, or it won’t, and if it isn’t that book will be even sadder, but it will not exist because everyone is against a world sovereignty that would limit their national sovereignty and prevent their national vendettas.

By 2100 there will be a sovereign global law, or there won’t be any laws.

The Encampment for Citizenship

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by probaway in diary

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Channing Club, Eleanor Roosevelt, Encampment for Citizenship, Fieldston School, J. Robert Oppenheimer, New York city, NYC, One of my life's high points, The Ethical Culture Society, Unitarian

I attended The Encampment for Citizenship in New York City, at the Fieldston School the summer of 1956. There have been many of these encampments starting in 1945 with input from many famous people, such as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The six-week encampments were directed by Algernon Black for decades, and they are still continuing. A brief history of the accomplishments of the Encampment. Many of the several thousand attendees of the Encampments have said this experience was a high point in their life; it certainly was for me. It wasn’t until much later that I realize just how important it was. A link to YouTube video – Long Live the Encampment for Citizenship.

I was twenty years old when I attended, which was a typical age for the students, and already totally in tune with the ethics and world view of the sponsors – The Ethical Culture Society. I thought of these people as just ordinary people behaving as reasonable people should behave. It has taken decades for me to realize just how extraordinary those ordinary people were; they were dedicating their lives to making the world an ethically better place. Perhaps everyone feels they are working toward that goal, but these Encampment people were so far out ahead that the world lost contact with them, although not they with the world. The Encampment was demonstrating how people could learn to appreciate other people, their life circumstances, their problems and decisions. The goal was to open young people’s minds to alternate ways of seeing opportunities for action, to present possible solutions, and ways of evaluating results, rather than their accepting pat solutions passed to them from unknowable authorities. After a lecture we would break up into small groups and discuss what we had heard and how it applied to our situations back home, or wherever we came from, and we came from very different places: Indians, Negroes, farmers, Manhattanites, foreigners, poor, rich, disenfranchised people and connected ones. It was a cross-section of the periphery of humanity.

Among the many field trips, we went to Hyde Park, the home of ex-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family, and we met with his, at the time, equally famous wife Eleanor Roosevelt. After she spoke to us as a group for a while, we formed a receiving line and spoke to her personally for a minute. When my turn came, this woman who was revered by my mother’s side of my family, said to me, “Charles, did you know our families are related?” I blushed in absolute astonishment and fled in embarrassment. Only much later did I discover that she was right. That among her life-long associates were the descendents of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor. That was the wealthy side of my family name who lived in upstate New York; my ancestral side of the family was consistently the youngest son of the youngest son, who continued exploring west, and remained economically middle class. My family relationship was real, but very tenuous indeed. (Update: 2014/07/01 I was just asked by the Encampment if this post might be referenced by them, so I thought it appropriate to reread it and verify the details. In doing so the family ancestry of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was checked, and I was dumbfounded to see my maternal grandmother‘s family Aspinwall name was also referenced. John Aspiwall Roosevelt was Elanore’s youngest son.)

After the Encampment I hitchhiked to Princeton, New Jersey and went to the Institute of Advanced Studies, where the Encampment had scheduled a meeting for me. It was the weekend and the building was closed, but after knocking on the door for a while, it was answered by someone whose face I recognized, but it wasn’t Oppenheimer, whom I was supposed to meet. He pointed to the telephone, and walked away to his office, and I was alone inside the main hall of the most famous scientific think tank in the world. I phoned Oppenheimer, and then hitched a ride over to his home, and talked to him for half an hour, mostly personal stuff about our common experiences, but my purpose for being there was to ask him to come to Washington State College at Pullman to speak to my Unitarian student group, the Channing Club. Oppenheimer had recently been denied the right to speak at the University of Washington at Seattle, and I thought I could ask him to speak to our off-campus student group. All that came of this effort was my faculty adviser, Cynthia Schuster, being instantly fired for corrupting the youth – me. She was one of my best friends at that time, but she simply vanished because of the McCarthy-era fanaticism that gripped the US. I never thought of myself as a radical in any way, but just a person who responded reasonably to the situations confronting me, and yet Joe McCarthy fingered me personally. That derailed my Air Force career as a pilot, but I got back on track a couple of months later, only to be derailed permanently a couple of years later.

Although these weeks may not sound like a typical success story, in fact they were the emotional foundation for quite a few more successful actions later in my life.